This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.

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Philip Zelikow

White Burkett Miller Professor of History

Текст видео

Hi, welcome back. Make yourself comfortable. In this last talk for the week, we're going to see the way this democratic revolution is spreading around the world. During the 1790s, imaginations throughout the Atlantic world and Europe and even beyond are gripped by what's happening, above all, in France. France, in the 1700s, had been the most well-known country in all the Atlantic world. It was the most powerful country in Europe. Its writers were the leading thinkers of Europe. In today's world a lot of people feel like English is the necessary common language. In the world of the 1700s that language was French. Cultivated people all over Europe had to be able to speak French. This just gives you some sense of how anyone reading about these developments felt that they either were in sympathy with them or opposed to them. People are choosing sides. In the narrative of revolution, there's a tendency to make this sound like, well here are these revolutionary ideas, the forces of progress, and then there are these sort of passive things that they're sweeping away. This a bit of a false image. Traditional beliefs are powerful and popular among a great many people: people who believe in the tenets of the Catholic Church; believe in what their parish priest does for their community; believe in established authority and a stable order of things. When they see the kind of threats, the wrecking ball coming from revolution, they're not reacting passively to that. They're fearful and worried, and that itself becomes a really powerful political movement. I talked last time about the creation of a French nation. In many ways, the challenge of the French nation is going to help create a British nation as a countervailing community to oppose that French revolutionary nation. Counter-revolution is a powerful force, and it's not just a negative force. In a way, it has positive ideals of it's own. Study this illustration produced in 1792. Here's the way the counter-revolutionaries are expressing the contrast between British liberty and French liberty. You see, in the illustration on the left, happy Britannia holding scales of justice. In her right hand, she's clutching the Magna Carta; that's a symbol of the traditional privileges and liberties. And you see the beneficent effect of Britain at sea, and under Britannia, there's religion, morality, at the very bottom you see... happiness. And on the right: French liberty. [LAUGH] It's not a very appealing image. Violence. The nobleman hanging from the lamp post. Underneath it, it stands for atheism, perjury, treason, anarchy, murder, at the very bottom...misery. That's a political argument, and it's a pretty powerful one in Britain and in many other places. All over Europe, people are choosing sides. Are you in favor of the existing aristocracy and its exclusive hold on power? Or do you want to open things up? Which definition of liberty do you favor? It would be very hard for people of influence to stay on the sidelines. A musician, a young composer, Ludwig van Beethoven is tremendously inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. All over Europe, people are inspired or they're appalled. But they're choosing sides. And not just in Europe. So in America, for example, during the 1790's, all of domestic politics is dominated by what is your stand on the French Revolution. If you support the revolution, you call yourself a Republican. Your Republican faction is led by Thomas Jefferson. If you're opposed to the revolution, you might call yourself a Federalist. You would denounce those Republicans as a Jacobin, borrowing the term of the Jacobin clubs that Robespierre and others had belonged to in revolutionary Paris. You might even call those Republicans democrats because, in the 1790s, to call someone as a democrat was a way of saying you favor mob rule. Which of course the Republicans denied. Intense arguments both in domestic politics because they're really about do you believe in the established order of social classes and so many other things. It's not just a foreign policy issue not just a domestic policy issue. Those kinds of labels blur. It was the issue that defined political argument, and not just in America but well beyond America. Why, Napoleon Bonaparte, general of the French Republic in 1798, is bringing his revolution to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Of course he proclaims... heï¿½s quite willing to proclaim himself someone who admires the Muslim faith. He's not doing it in the name of Christianity. He's doing it in the name of enlightenment. And he's bringing scientists in his train. By the end of the 1790s, people in India who were against the British: the Sultan of Mysore, who is fighting against them, is joining the Jacobin club and writing letters to the leaders of Republican France declaring his fealty to the ideals of the French Revolution and asking for advice in getting French advisors. That's in Southern India. In Spanish America, people in Spain are divided by their attitudes towards the Catholic Church and its aristocracy. Those divisions are spreading all over the Spanish colonies of America, which are watching and waiting to see what's going to happen in Europe. This revolutionary period is evoking a whole new language in politics. Terms that we use nowadays like left-wing, right-wing, Thermidor (which is the term for the reaction against Robespierre and the stabilization of the Republic), even terms like reactionary, these are all terms that flow out of this period to define the way we talk about politics today. And during the 1790s, as the stakes of these wars grow, the wars become more and more total. These are wars about the whole nature of your community. In places like the Vendee in western France, the French Revolutionary public sends armies with the orders to destroy the towns, destroy whole communities. And the communities, in turn, fight a bloody war against the representatives of Paris and the Revolution. Both sides feel as if they're fighting for their lives. Hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered. Whole communities laid waste. And overseas, in France's most valuable colonies, the incredibly rich colony of Saint-Domingue, the pearl of the French West Indies, is convulsed by a slave revolt. Because, of course, who can read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and not think that there's something wrong with slavery? The French Republic is divided on the issue. But the slaves take the fight into their own hands. An overwhelming majority of the population, the revolt spreads, as this map displays, following the lines of the green arrows. If you look over on the left, you see that the British, in 1794, try to claim Saint-Domingue as a British Colony. Their assault will fail. The birthplace of the revolt is in the city of Le Cap. Here's an image, a contemporary image, of what the slave revolt meant in the city of Le Cap. You see at the top: Incendie du Cap. At the bottom: the general revolt of the blacks, the massacre of the whites. If anything, this illustration is a very polite version of what was going on. Horrific bloodshed of every kind as the pent up grievances of generations exploded. This, too, is part of the global ripples of the French Revolution. So here's the situation at the end of the 1790s: The French Republic has survived. It's led by a strong First Consul. The French Republic is the strongest military power in Europe. The French Revolutionary cause has become a global cause, convulsing the Atlantic world. Meanwhile, through the 1700s, see the fusion of the Commercial Revolution, the Military Revolution, the democratic revolutions fusing together by the end of the century to create tremendous momentum. The Europeans, building on their commercial advantage, their military power growing as they're now waging new kinds of war, are now infused with the confidence and the vigor of the fights that they're in, the optimism that they now represent waves of the political future. Whether it's one version of liberty led by France and its allies or another version of liberty or even those who are fighting to preserve the established order, there's a sense in which the Europeans are now projecting a kind of cultural confidence: that whatever the decision of their arguments, that's going to be the wave of the future. And that kind of struggle is going to frame what we are going to discuss next week: a period of revolutionary wars that will set the stage for the rest of the century.